[Assam] First Prize Winner!

[Chan Mahanta]

Hi Rajib:

I don't know how to do that. Can you help? What is Flickr?

c-da



At 8:11 PM -0700 8/13/06, Rajib Das wrote:
>C-da,
>
>Have you put up all your photographs on Flickr?
>
>Rajib
>
>
>--- Dilip/Dil Deka <dilipdeka at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>  Guess who?  Chandan Mahanta had the best picture  in
>>  the Best Garden Photography category of the 2006 St.
>>  Louis Post-Dispatch Great Garden Contest.
>>
>======================================================================
>>   
>>    Picture perfect
>>    By Becky Homan
>>    SPECIAL TO THE POST-DISPATCH
>>    08/12/2006
>>            
>>  The pale-yellow flower of a native lotus (Nelumbo
>>  lutea) is a close-up photo by Chan Mahanta,
>>  first–place winner in the Best Garden Photography
>>  category of the 2006 St. Louis Post-Dispatch Great
>>  Garden Contest.
>>  (Chan Mahanta)
>>
>>  How do you tell a plant to say "cheese?"
>>
>>  Here's how, metaphorically speaking. You look for
>>  the most beautiful, if subdued, daylight - early in
>>  the morning on what will be a sunny day, or anytime
>>  that high clouds make for bright-but-overcast
>>  weather. You find a flower or foliage or some scene
>>  that moves you to want its picture. And you come in
>>  close if your camera has a macro lens, or you step
>>  back with a longer lens and work on just the right
>>  composition for your image.
>>
>>  Winners in the Best Garden Photography category of
>>  the 2006 St. Louis Post-Dispatch Great Garden
>>  Contest did most of these things. And more. All are
>>  amateur photographers, by the way, but with
>>  gardening or photography among their favorite
>>  hobbies.
>>
>>  "Overall, the entries were impressive," says contest
>>  founder, horticulturist and judge Ken Miller. "Some
>>  people took pretty common subjects and made them
>>  special. Others took exotics and did the same."    
>>                   Advertisement
>>   
>>
>>
>>
>>  Chan Mahanta of the Old Jamestown neighborhood near
>>  Florissant did both. He came in first in this
>>  category.
>>
>>  His close-up image of the pale-yellow flower of a
>>  native lotus (Nelumbo lutea) is breathtaking -
>>  familiar and alien, all at the same time.
>>
>>  That photo, says another of the contest judges,
>>  horticulturist John Mareing, "is quite unique in
>>  that he has focused his camera on the very center of
>>  the lotus flower at the time of pollination.
>>
>>  "Mahanta's photo captures the contrast between the
>>  impressive developing pod and the delicate stamens
>>  surrounding it," Mareing continues. "The composition
>>  is interesting and artistic, and the photo exhibits
>>  great clarity and depth."
>>
>>  Mahanta, like the third-place winner in this
>>  category, Dave Bennett, had won prizes in other
>>  categories of previous Great Garden Contests.
>>  Mahanta placed first in Best Home Garden by an
>>  Amateur in 2004, and Bennett won third place for
>>  Best Flower Garden in 2003.
>>
>>  This wasn't a problem for the judges, who worked
>>  "blind" when reviewing the photos and learned of
>>  each previous winner's status after making their
>>  picks.     MORE
>>    SLIDESHOW: See photos of the winners gardens
>>    GROUP WINNERS: Together again
>>    EDIBLE WINNERS: Edible efforts win prizes in
>>  garden contest
>>    SERENITY WINNERS: Outdoor oasis
>>    PROFESSIONAL AID WINNERS: The 'wow' factor
>>    AMATUER WINNERS: From cottage to collections
>>    MORE CONTEST STORIES
>>    2006 Great Garden Contest winners
>>    Judges tell their own stories
>  >
>>
>>
>>  "We don't have published rules regulating that," Ken
>>  Miller says. "We have an unofficial rule not to
>>  allow the same gardener to win two years in a row.
>>  These (2006 photo winners) already waited two years,
>>  and they've also gone into an entirely different
>>  field."
>>
>>  For Chan, photography grew out his father's love for
>>  the subject.
>>
>>  The elder Mahanta had dropped out of high school in
>>  the Assam state of British India in the eighth
>>  grade, Chan says. He went to learn commercial art
>>  and photography in Dacca, now the capital of
>  > Bangladesh. "He ended his career as a country
>>  photographer," Chan adds, when the prosperous tea
>>  trade waned near the end of British rule. But before
>>  that happened, Chan's father was a society
>>  photographer for both native and British society,
>>  "all of the 'Who's Who'," Chan says, "and he made a
>>  pretty decent living."
>>
>>  All of his photography was done without electricity,
>>  by the way, in a "lean-to" with a mirror reflecting
>>  sunlight through a small hole on the north side of
>>  the little building, for making exposures. "When I
>>  tell this to my friends in photography now," he
>>  adds, "they are mesmerized."
>>
>>  Chan's family was able to send him to the Indian
>>  Institute of Technology, where photography led him
>>  to study architecture. "Photography made a big
>>  impression on my life," Chan says. "It is the art of
>>  looking at things."
>>
>>  He didn't own a camera until 1971, a full year after
>>  immigrating to the states. It was then that he
>>  bought a single-lens reflex Canon. He still shoots
>>  with an updated version of that film camera but with
>>  newer Fuji Velvia film that, he says, produces
>>  beautiful color. "What I get with the digital camera
>>  can't quite match it, yet." All of his contest
>>  photos were shot on film.
>>
>>  Also a passion is the macro lens, designed to focus
>>  at very short distances for nearly life-size
>>  magnification. "If you go and frame something close
>>  up," he says, "all of a sudden a whole new world
>>  opens up, and you see things that most people miss."
>>
>>  The lotus photo is a prime example of that. But it
>>  isn't the first close-up lotus image that he's had
>>  published. He asks a visitor to wait a minute while
>>  he walks to another part of the airy house of his
>>  own design. (He practices architecture as Mahanta
>>  Associates, PC., Architects.) He returns with a copy
>>  of a Los Angeles Times magazine, dated 1976. On its
>>  cover is a Chan Mahanta lotus, photographed during
>>  his first years in this country. He was living in
>>  Pasadena at the time and met the magazine's editor.
>>  Exactly 30 years later, it is almost too much of a
>>  coincidence to see another of his lotus images on a
>>  cover.
>>
>>  "Lotus is my favorite plant," he explains, "all
>>  parts of it, the flowers, the leaves and the buds.
>>
>>  "But whenever I see something special," he adds, "I
>>  just go and shoot it."
>>
>>  Second-place winner Nancy Olson of Mehlville also
>>  has a fondness for close-up looks at her garden.
>>  "You don't have to be a wonderful gardener," she
>>  says, "to be attracted to the wonders in your yard."
>>
>>  Judges liked her beautifully lit blossoms of
>>  bleeding heart and her painterly image of a very
>>  common tomato plant. "Nancy turned tomatoes into
>>  art," says judge Miller. "Clearly, to her eye,
>>  vegetables rule."
>>
>>  "I kind of always have been attracted to
>>  photography," says the native St. Louisan, with a
>>  degree in English, two grown children, grandchildren
>>  and active church work that she shares with her
>>  husband, Jeff.
>>
>>  But in the fall of 1998, when Jeff's company
>>  transferred him to another city "temporarily"
>>  (two-and-a-half years), the two agreed that she
>>  would stay here. And with plenty of time on her
>>  hands, Olson says, she took a course in nature
>>  photography at the Missouri Botanical Garden.
>>
>>  It made a world of difference for her. "I totally
>>  fell in love with photography," she says.
>>
>>  Her family's old film camera eventually gave way to
>>  a new Nikon that uses film. Now, she also has a
>>  Nikon digital "that's just as fast as a film
>  > camera."
>>
>>  "If you're a serious photographer," Olson adds,
>>  "it's just so frustrating with the lag time in the
>>  shutter speed of some digitals." Half of her winning
>>  contest pictures were shot with film, half done
>>  digitally.
>>
>>  And like Chan Mahanta, she loves shooting "closer,
>>  and closer and closer. The farther in you go,
>>  there's another miracle and then another miracle -
>>  the exquisite nature of creation."
>>
>>
>=== message truncated ===>
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